


Moonage Daydream

by lullabelle



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Community: whoverse_las, Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-18
Updated: 2010-10-18
Packaged: 2018-01-07 11:29:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1119303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lullabelle/pseuds/lullabelle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ianto gets a faceful of alien hallucinogenics.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moonage Daydream

**Author's Note:**

> Written for whoverse_las Challenge #4. The quote to use was: ""But I rather like hope. Hope's a good emotion."

Drip tick ticking tock, a second hand stuttering, no sense of rhythm. His stomach burns like whiskey afterglow, and he’s a little afraid his hands have disappeared.

“Ianto?” asks the navy blue bas relief before him as it peels itself away from the water tower, the flow down its (phallic) length rippling and undeterred by the figure’s departure. “Are you okay?”

Ianto turns the syllables over in his head, tries to make them connect. Ahrryoo ohkaay.

“Yes?” he tries. Oh, there his hands are! He holds them in front of his face, fingers spread and stretched to quivering, focuses. He won’t lose them again, and it’s easier to concentrate on them than Jack who is gaining depth as he draws closer and closer and finally grasps Ianto’s hands in his own, gently pulling them down. Ianto lets out a distressed whine as they disappear from view. He’d only just found them!

Jack scrutinizes Ianto's face, and Ianto’s face scrutinizes back. The teency tincy lines around Jack’s eyes make him think of cracks in dried mud that disappear when the rain pours in, and he wonders if they would disappear if he licked them wet. He moves toward Jack’s face with his tongue out, but Jack stops him with one hand firmly grasping his jaw.

“Your pupils are blown all to hell.”

Ianto glares, not at the accusation, but at the fact that Jack’s grip is keeping him from drawing his tongue back in.

Jack releases him. Ianto waggles his tongue around a bit before returning it to its position in his mouth. He watches Jack’s lips as he talks. Up, down, open, shut, flash of teeth, hint of tongue, up, open, down, shut.

“Ianto, are you listening?”

Open, shut, teeth, tongue. Tongue. “Tongue.”

“Tongue?”

“Alien plant. The one with the mouth. It spit at me. In my face.” He slaps one hand against his face for clarification, and then reaches for Jack’s. This time Jack lets him. Ianto makes a mental note. Reach with fingers, not with tongue, for maximization of Jack-touching.

“Dionaea veritisula.” He grins under Ianto’s exploring fingertips. Mmm, stubble. “You must be tripping balls.”

“I took --” Ianto swallows, tries to get his thoughts in the proper order before pushing them out his mouth. “I took e once. When I was younger. It made the walls pulse.”

“Yeah? You scoundrel. How does this compare?”

“The walls are fucking tap dancing,” he says.

Jack laughs and pulls away from the greedy fingers. He catches Ianto’s hand in his own again, leads him to the couch. “Sit,” he orders, even as he helps him ease down. Ianto finds it’s a bit easier to think now that he’s not concentrating quite so much on standing.

Jack sits down next to him, doesn’t fight when Ianto pulls one of Jack’s arms around his own shoulders and huddles down for a rather enthusiastic cuddle, rubbing his face against Jack’s chest like a cat.

“How are you feeling?” Jack asks.

“Um. Sparked. Floaty. Hopeful, maybe.”

“I’m not so sure about sparked and floaty, but I rather like hope. Hope is a good emotion.”

“Maybe not hope,” Ianto reconsiders, his breath moistening the overstarched fabric of Jack’s shirt. “This is Torchwood. Abandon that shit, forthwith. _Posthaste._ ”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Jack tells him. He pauses. What he is about to say feels like a confession; something private, something he might not say out loud if he thought Ianto would remember it later. “You’re still here, aren’t you, after everything? I don’t think you would be if you didn’t have some hope. Though,” Jack adds after some consideration, “maybe not for yourself. I think you have hope for others. Hope for your fellow man,” he says, grinning, because he knows it’s incredibly cheesy, but he suspects it’s true. He knows it’s true with regard to himself, anyway.

Ianto grunts his agreement even though the thought is a tad too complex for him right now. He closes his eyes, and without the visual input his high loses some of its “sparked” quality and floaty sensation gets floatier, and he lets himself. Float, that is.

Jack smooths one hand down the side of Ianto’s face. Concerned at the sudden lack of movement, he uses two fingers to pry one eyelid open, and Ianto makes a mightily unhappy noise at the influx of light. Satisfied he’s okay, the hand disappears.

“Keep touching,” Ianto orders, and the fingers come back, gentle, smoothing lines from forehead, to cheek, to jawline, to neck, leaving a trail of sensation which is sometimes smooth and cool like a ski trail down a slope and is sometimes stuttery and loud like a train on old tracks. Jack’s hands have always been surprisingly soft, reborn smooth again after every death, and Ianto’s not sure if he says something about them out loud or not. He’s also not sure whether or not Jack tells him about how, once upon a time, his hands had been hard from work, but rubbed smooth from the sand in the hot faraway place where he’d lived. He’s not sure if Jack tells him how his hands had earned callouses from a fishing rod long before they’d ever touched a firearm. The notion makes Ianto wish for a candle, so he can cover Jack’s fingertips in wax and let him keep touching, but everywhere, more, while Ianto can pretend that they are somewhere sandy and hot, a scene of Jack’s past from when he was still young and finite.

In the end, Ianto’s not sure how much of this he’s hallucinated. He hopes none of it, but he never mentions any of it to Jack, just in case.


End file.
